The Deep
The Deep is the second book in Gordon's third smash-hit adventure series, the Dive trilogy. In book one, we met four teens who were accepted on an internship with the prestigious Poseidon Oceanographic Institute, an internship program that consists mainly of utterly ignoring them.
Concluding that they were selected not for their skills, but for their lack of them, our dive team comes to the conclusion that their Poseidon superiors are up to no good. Now the kids are determined to discover the lost pirate ship, sunk in this area, and find any possible treasures before the Poseidon team can.
Unfortunately, there are many dangers in the waters, human and natural, and some of them may be more than the inexperienced team can handle.
From the Book:
Perhaps
one diver in a thousand would have noticed the faint glimmer on the ocean floor.
Dante Lewis spotted it immediately.
Silver!
Heart
racing, he deflated his buoyancy compensator vest and began to descend toward
it, passing towering coral formations and clouds of sea life.
The
Hidden Shoals off the Caribbean island of St. Luc boasted some of the most spectacular
colors on the face of the earth – the brilliant turquoise of a parrotfish,
the electric magenta of red algae, the neon yellow of a snapper’s tail,
the shimmering violet of a school of Creole wrasses.
Dante
perceived none of it.
That
wasn’t exactly true. He could see everything – and far sharper than
the average person. But only in black and white and shades of gray.
The
promising thirteen-year-old photographer was colorblind. That was why he had
accepted the diving internship at Poseidon Oceanographic Institute. Not to learn
color – his brain wasn’t wired for that. But maybe he could learn
to detect it, deduce it from the clues he could see – light, dark, and
shading.
He
checked the Fathometer on his dive watch. Forty feet.
So
far, the plan was a dismal failure. Descending in full scuba gear, Dante swung
around his Nikonos underwater camera to snap a picture of a flamingo tongue
– a rare spotted snail, supposedly orange on peach. To Dante, it appeared
gray on gray.
Everything
is gray on gray, he reminded himself glumly. And it always will be.
Sixty
feet. He looked down. The glint of silver was still far below.
Now
he was stuck on a backward island in the middle of nowhere for the whole summer.
There was nothing to do but dive, an activity that he wasn’t much good
at, and liked even less. He had almost gotten himself killed at least once.
And
for what? Gray fish, gray plants, gray coral.
But
there was money in these waters. From centuries of sunken ships. Dante and his
companions had already found an antique Spanish piece of eight. His brow clouded.
The three-hundred-year-old coin had been stolen from them by their supervisor,
Tad Cutter. The interns would not make the mistake of trusting the slick Californian
again.
Eighty
feet. It was deeper than he had ever been, but he barely gave it a second thought.
He was completely focused on reaching the source of the glimmer.
And
then his flippers made contact with soft sandy bottom. He peered down at the
object that had drawn him to the depths.
A
Seven-Up can.
His
disappointment surged like the clouds of bubbles that rose from his breathing
apparatus.
Stupid,
he berated himself. It was crazy to believe that every glint in the ocean was
some kind of lost treasure.
But
it would have been sweet to snag a pile of silver and rub it in Cutter’s
face! The institute man had done a lot more than swipe one little coin. He and
his team had taken over the wreck site it had come from.
They’re
probably over there right now, digging up our discovery!
It
was a huge rip-off, no question about it. Yet the whole business didn’t
seem to bother Dante right then. Instead he felt pretty good. A dull pleasant
fatigue, like a runner’s high.
Funny
– he was normally pretty nervous on a dive. Underwater seemed like a place
that people simply weren’t meant to be. But today he was confident. Fearless,
even.
A
curious lionfish ventured close – a mass of spines and fins and stripes.
An
underwater porcupine in designer clothes!
In
some remote corner of his mind, it occurred to Dante that he should take a picture
of such a remarkable fish. But he made no move for the Nikonos tethered to his
arm. Instead, he reached out to touch an elaborately striped fin.
The
attack came from above, knocking him backwards. His dive partner, fourteen-year-old
Star Ling grabbed him linebacker-style around the waist, driving him away from
his quarry. She shook a scolding finger in his face, then whipped out a dive
slate and scribbled: POISON!
Dante
squinted at the message, his vision darkening at the edges. He could see all
the letters, but for the life of him, he couldn’t put them together to
read the word. What the young photographer didn’t realize was that he
was experiencing nitrogen narcosis – the rapture of the deep. Under deep-water
pressure, the nitrogen in air dissolves in the bloodstream, producing an effect
similar to drunkenness. In diving lingo, he was “narced.”
All
that registered with Dante was that he was having a fine time, and here was
Star, ruining it. The lionfish had gotten away, leaving Dante sweating from
his efforts.
Who
needs a rubber suit to dive in boiling water?
Before
Star’s horrified eyes, Dante unzipped his lightweight tropical skin suit
and began to peel off the thin material. In his narced state, he had forgotten
that the wetsuit was not for warmth; it was for protection from the sting of
coral and other venomous sea life.
She
grabbed him and held on. He fought back, the upper half of the wetsuit flapping
from his waist.
That
was when she saw the shark.
© 2002 by Gordon Korman, used with permission